It's a sad day here at the NPUCC-USWI (NextPowerUp Command Center in Wisconsin). The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has put the kibosh on the Wisconsin-based brewery Lakemaid Beer's plans to deliver cases of beers to customers using drones.

With the recent announcements that entities such as Amazon and the United Parcel Service (UPS) were looking into package delivery using drones, Lakemaid came up with a cunning plan to use them to deliver cases, or 12-packs, of beer to fishermen who were out on the lakes ice fishing. They had even tested it on several frozen lakes. The fishermen would call in and place the order, give the company their GPS coordinates and the company would send out a drone with the frosty brew to help out the thirsty fishermen.

Unfortunately, the FAA stepped in an informed them that it currently restricts the use of the small drones for commercial applications, and that they were in violation of agency regulations. An FAA spokesperson stated that, "Our concern is the safety of people on the ground and the safety of people in the air." Unfortunately, we were unable to find any hard data on the volume of air traffic flying within 100 feet of the surface of the local lakes (it's probably somewhere around zero).

Anyway, there were other considerations that the brewery was dealing with, such as verifying that the person receiving the drone shipment was of legal drinking age, which is 21 years old in the state of Wisconsin. One of the other problems was that the brewery made a video of it and posted it on their YouTube channel, which is a bad move when you live in a country that has agencies like the NSA. The President of the brewery stated that they will be looking at other options for drone delivery and this time will not post it in a video.